So, now you know how to add an autumn twist to your summer photos – but how do you get the best from a genuine autumn landscape shot?
Here, we show you the three simple stages you should go through to make your image leap from the screen.

Make sure that the scene has a wide range of shadows, midtones and highlights. Boost the colour saturation. Introduce a little bit of sharpening to make the finer textures stand out. Done!

It doesn’t take long at all, and within a matter of minutes you’ll have a crisp and vibrant autumnal shot. Check out the steps below and learn how you can take a typical autumn scene and make a print with real punch.

01 Terrific tones
The darker bark of tree trunks isn’t always that clear. To reveal some of that hidden midtone texture, we created a new Levels Adjustment Layer, dragging the grey midtones Input Levels slider left to 1.20 to brighten the midtones without altering the darkest shadows or blowing the highlights.

02 Super saturation
Autumn means punchy colour, so we clicked the Create Adjustment Layer icon and chose Hue/Saturation. We dragged the Master Saturation slider up to +16 to boost the intensity of the russet brown leaves – any further would have caused the colour to ‘block up’ and lose all fine detail.

Stay sharp
Using the Background layer, we chose Enhance>AdjustSharpness, setting Amount to 85% and Radius to 1.5. We set the Remove drop-down menu to Lens Blur to gently increase the contrast between shadow and highlight pixels, making details stand out without adding blown-out highlights.